The 1970s: A glimpse at the decade

The 1970s was a tumultuous decade in India. It was defined by the Emergency, a declaration in 1975 that, lasting 21 months, suspended civil liberties on grounds of threats to national security, both internal and external. The decade was also marked by armed peasant rebellions in the countryside that drew support in cities like Calcutta (now Kolkata), the refugee crisis because of the 1971 Bangladesh War, a general railway strike in 1974, a highly energized student movement against corruption (what one scholar termed the “last breath of Gandhian politics”), and in 1981, a massive textile strike that ended in failure for the trade unions representing Bombay’s hundreds of thousands of mill workers.

The Emergency’s impact on film culture was multifaceted. Prints of filmmaker Amrit Nahata's 1975 political satire, Kissa Kursi Ka/The Tale of the Throne, were confiscated and destroyed by authorities. In 1977, Nahata remade the movie and the Pearson collection includes a publicity brochure of the re-made version.

There were other effects. The government had set up an auditorium for art cinema in Delhi, the first of its kind, and that theater was shut down for “security” reasons. Several members of the central government’s Film Finance Corporation (FFC), which had been feted for funding a wave of inventive “new cinema” films between 1968 and 1974, resigned en masse because of increased interference. The bureaucratic discourse around government support for non-commercial “new cinema” films shifted to stricter norms of “financial discipline”. Relatives of prominent directors were sent to jail. The highest grossing film of 1973, a teen romance called Bobby (1973) was reportedly telecast on government-run TV to diminish attendance at an opposition political rally during the Emergency (see snippet below from the Times of India).

Private film societies, catering to the interest in international art cinema from fans, cineastes, filmmakers, and scholars alike, had mushroomed from a nationwide total of 6 in 1959 to 169 in 1978. The intense political turmoil of that decade saw a distinct shift in film society debates from the cultivation of “good taste” in “good cinema”, to the need for a directly political aesthetics (see the posters on Film Festivals in this exhibition).

The era’s turmoil found a retroactive explanation in the new anti-hero that emerged in Hindi commercial cinema in that decade. The “Angry Young Man” and his brooding self-destructive nihilism became grounds for almost ritually guaranteed action sequences of violence, embodied by the decade's biggest film star, Amitabh Bachchan (below: Bachchan in a scene from Deewar/Wall, 1975).

But even Tamil films captured the "revolutionary" ardor of the decade. K. Balachandar's Apoorva Rangangal/Wondrous Melodies (1975) features a hero who models himself on Hong Kong martial arts star Bruce Lee (below: actor Kamal Hasan in frames from the movie).

In Pakistan, violent rural vigilante films in Punjabi centered around revenge and the restoration of masculine honor became popular (below: brochure for Bashira, 1972, Pakistan).

While some serious filmmakers depicted that era's turbulence directly, others preferred to allude to social turmoil as the persistent, ambient backdrop to stories of personal disillusionment and professional failure, as was the case with Bengali art films such as Pratidwandi/The Adversary, 1970, and Seemabaddha/Company Limited, 1971, whose brochures are included in this collection (below: cover of Pratidwandi brochure).

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to reduce the cinema of the 1970s to politics. The films made in that decade were extraordinarily diverse, and those alluding to political turmoil, only a fraction of the total set of movies. The collection includes film stills from seven popular films by the Tamil film director K. Balachander (1930-2014), and publicity materials pertaining to thirteen Punjabi language films, of which one already mentioned above, Aslam Dar’s 1972 film Bashira, is from Pakistan. Also present is a songbook (cover pictured below) for Alibaba Marjinaa (1977, Hindi), a movie in a genre, the Arabian Nights oriental fantasy tale, that had its heyday in the silent and early sound era.

Represented in this collection are art and commercial films alike that took up themes of religious superstition, obscurantism, and miraculous devotion in films such as Kondura (Telugu/Hindi, 1978), Baba Taraknath (Bengali, 1977), and Dhyanu Bhagat (Punjabi, 1978). Among the biggest surprise hits of that decade was a low-budget Hindi devotional film Jai Santoshi Maa (Hindi, 1975) that spawned a cult dedicated to the hitherto little-known eponymous Hindu goddess Santoshi Maa (movie brochure pictured below).

Eleven major South Asian languages are represented in the collection. Included are publicity materials for two Pakistani films; a Bangladeshi remake of Hindi “superhit” Sholay; the songbook for the very first Afghan film Ishq Wa Dosti/Love or Friendship (1946) which was an Indian-Afghan co-production, and the first Nepali color film, Kumari (1977). (Pictured below: Brochure for Ishq Wa Dosti).

Several films represented in the collection as publicity materials are not easily available for viewing in their entirety except perhaps at brick-and-mortar archives. Such is the case with Aandhla Marto Dola (1973, Marathi, India), Gharnata/Grenada (1971, Urdu, Pakistan), and Phir Bhi/And Yet… (1971, Hindi, India). Badnam Basti/The Alley of Ill Repute (1971, Hindi, India) was recently discovered in a German archive but has not been released for wider viewing and the presence of its brochure in the collection speaks to the collection’s research value. The collection also includes a publicity brochure and a production still from an unreleased film, Ankhin Dekhi, directed by the Hindi litterateur Rajinder Singh Bedi, and set in the 1930s. (Pictured Below: Brochure cover for Andhla Marto Dola).